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To say that A Man Came Out of a Door in the Mountain surprised me would be a grave understatement. If you work in the book trade, as I do, that doesn’t happen very often.

Working with books — as a writer, a bookseller, a reviewer — has a pre-requisite that you immerse yourself in that world. You have to keep current, which, in the book trade, means looking months ahead. You spend hours buried in catalogues, or online. You follow publishing sources on social media. It becomes your world. As a result, it’s very rare to be surprised by a book. A book published this week has been on the book professionals’ radar for months, if not longer. Heck, we were talking about Stephen King’s Doctor Sleep years ahead of its publication last fall.

And the current buzz is all about J.K. Rowling’s next outing as Robert Galbraith, which won’t be in stores until June. For a book lover, that’s both a blessing and a curse: it’s terrific to be in the loop, to be able to savour the anticipation of an upcoming read. But it also means you never have the delirious accident of discovery, that moment of finding a book that you know nothing about, a book you read free from any of the publication noise and hype, a book that, well, blows you away.

Well, almost never.

I didn’t know anything about A Man Came Out of a Door in the Mountain, the debut novel from Port Townsend writer Adrianne Harun until a week or so before its publication, and I was able to read it cold, without any idea of what to expect, without any preconceptions.

And it ...

Let me put it like this: in a just world, A Man Came Out of a Door in the Mountain would be making headlines. You’d be reading about mammoth advances and film sales and think pieces. In a just world, it would be the big buzz book of the season.

Instead, it’s a spectacular read, one you can come to fresh. And come to it you should. No, you must.

In hopes of giving you the same reading experience with the novel that I had, I’ll avoid going into too much detail.

At a glance, though: Harun writes in her afterword that the novel was “sparked by outrage over the ongoing murders and disappearances of aboriginal women along Highway 16, the so-called ‘Highway of Tears,’ in northern British Columbia.”

The book is not, however, “about” that ongoing tragedy (and the seeming official complacence after these disappearances). Rather, it uses the menace of those crimes, of the malevolence and violence in the air, as a backdrop for a novel that is part folk tale, part horror story, part thriller and part literary fiction. It’s an odd combination, necessitating shifts of tone and approach at every turn, which creates a dreamlike state of readerly suspension: you’re never quite sure where you are, what is real, but you trust in Harun to show you the way if not through, then at least deeper in.

Set in a dilapidated small town along a stretch of highway where native women have been disappearing, A Man Came Out of a Door in the Mountain follows a central cast of young people, a group of five friends, through a few days in the height of summer, days which see the arrival of two strangers in town, a card shark and a woman with white hair and porcelain skin.

We know these strangers are trouble at first glance: we know our folk tales. We’ve heard about the devil coming to town, sowing dissent, and reaping its rewards. The characters in the novel know it too, and much of the considerable force of the book is following them as they attempt to resist, as they knowingly succumb.

A Man Came Out of a Door in the Mountain is remarkable. It reads with the level care of a finely crafted story, the sort you might find in a literary magazine (Harun cut her teeth in publications like Story, Narrative Magazine, and the Ontario Review), but also with the fresh familiarity of a folksong. The characters are at once realistically drawn, and mythic, archetypal. The setting is magical, but squalid, and the narrative develops both naturalistically and in the form of a tale.

That Harun can maintain these — and countless other — delicate balances is akin to the stranger’s card tricks, the way cards change even after they’re dealt. As a book, it shouldn’t work; not only does it, but Harun makes it look effortless. A Man Came Out of a Door in the Mountain is literary magic of the highest order.

Robert J. Wiersema is the author of Before I Wake and Bedtime Story. His new novel, Black Feathers, will be published early next year.

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